the cats may see themselves as the "Golden Race" they might think that the world revolves around their species. Orangutans may think humans are an underdeveloped inbred cousin to their race

I'm pretty sure that neither of them have the cognitive capability to think such things.

Concerning some other stuff you said: if other beings are so intelligent as to be able to travel between the stars, then I'm pretty sure they can figure out a lot about our biosphere and the basic relationship between different elements of it after they have made some brief observations. The basics are not difficult to notice, regardless of whether you have seen something similar before.

To everyone who is continuing the discussion from the Work Progress thread, talking about what should be implemented in SE: there seems to be a lot of "what ifs" and "suppose thats" being posted without giving much thought to how plausible the ideas are. When considering what is actually likely to exist and what should be considered when developing SpaceEngine, take some time and weigh your ideas against established science. Otherwise it just ends up being a bunch of random ideas in dozens of posts which are then analyzed and rejected by the two or three people actually examining them through the lens of science.

Harbinger_of_Life, I've really enjoyed your posted. Neither do I think aliens will come and ask for "Our leader", and neither we will take them to the U.S. President... We might even start a war to define our leader -.- However, about your idea of a carbon base hive-minded single organism, you should read (or see the movie) 'Solaris'. It touch that topic, but with a different point of view: what if alien life is so different to us that it is unrecognizable?

To the original 'Harbinger'; thanks. I guess I overlooked that in desperation to find another fully-cognitive species. Also, good point about their capabilities. Maybe if another sapient species arose on this planet, there would be more 'holy-wars' in between species over who is the golden race. That hasn't happened in known history, exception of the neanderthals. It would make quite an interesting story if there were two sapient races fighting for dominance on another planet, however.

Pzampella, thanks heaps! I will definitely look into Solaris; somebody has almost definitely had the same idea as I have. Like you, I think the possibilities of life are endless. Sure, our scientists can assume the whereabouts and potential appearances of lifeforms, but in the future, I have a feeling they will look back on their assumptions and laugh about it. Some things can be overlooked, in a similar fashion to looking at science 100 years ago.

Ah, they eschew all the attention to L in favor of the currently constrainable terms. I must say their reformulation of The Question is refreshing, even if the result is not even remotely surprising. Of course the development of intelligence must be absurdly improbable for us to be the only one that ever existed.

The trouble with L is that perhaps only primitive technological civilisations would send detectable signals. Once more advanced, which could be only a few years, leaked signals would have lost the coding redundancy and become indistinguishable from noise. Also, we don't know what their preferred method of communication is. What if there are other more practical ways than electromagnetic radiation, which we haven't found yet due to our limited knowledge of physics?

Considering the fact that we are here makes this not the case. I know you meant other intelligent life in which case simple probability suggests were are definitely not the only ones. The downside is if the probability is so low that on average it is less than 1 per galaxy at any given point in time, our nearest neighbor could be forever out of reach.

When I consider the human history, including the present, I'm honestly not sure if we can count as intelligent life.

i also believe that the universe isnt perfect. as we have good and bad\evil. the other intelligent life out there wont be perfect and will have good and evil. i think its just part of nuture. see animals...they evolved to be aggresive too even to each other in the same species. like lions that fight, but there is also lions that protect each other. so its not just in human nuture.i think its gonna be the same in other life out there